Nonsense with Numbers
The Chinese Art of Data
The irony in Derek Scissors’ AEI report, China’s Nonsense on Investing Overseas, is essentially a cosmic joke where the punchline is a spreadsheet error.
Scissors, who has presumably stared into the abyss of Chinese statistical reporting until the abyss stared back, highlights a "record" $213 billion in outbound investment for 2025. On the surface, this sounds impressive. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and the details here are less a devil and more a chaotic intern who forgot to save the file.
The irony lies in the fact that this "record" year was actually a disaster for the most visible part of the business: mergers and acquisitions. While the headline number soared, actual M&A spending collapsed by 40% to a paltry $15 billion. So, China posted a record investment year by... not investing in anything anyone can actually see. It’s like winning a marathon by running in place.
Then there’s the geography lesson. 72% of this alleged global footprint sits in Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands. For the uninitiated, these are places where money goes to hide, not to work. Scissors wryly notes that this capital is "round-tripping," which is a polite academic way of saying the money is going in a circle to look like it’s going somewhere. The Ministry of Commerce is counting money parked in offshore tax havens as a "global footprint," which is akin to claiming you’re a world traveler because you visited the airport lounge.
The arithmetic is where the humor turns from dry to slapstick. China reports nonfinancial investment at $183 billion in one column and $146 billion in another for the same year. Same terminology, different growth, different totals. It’s the statistical equivalent of knowing you have ten fingers, but count twelve fingers, and report both. When you strip away the Hong Kong shenanigans, the "record" investment drops to $76 billion with zero growth. The official number, Scissors suggests, "appears out of nowhere," much like a magician’s rabbit, except the rabbit is a ledger entry that doesn’t exist.
Scissors’ tone is the wry, exhausted sigh of an economist who has realized that the emperor has no clothes, no data, and possibly six fingers. He doesn’t accuse Beijing of outright fraud; he lets the contradictions do the talking. "Arithmetic puzzles like this pop up all over the ministry's numbers," he notes, as if commenting on the weather. The title itself is the thesis: it’s not that China is not investing abroad; it’s that the official narrative of doing so is nonsense. It’s a performance of global economic presence, a theatrical production where the set is made of paper and the actors are reading from scripts that don’t match.
The human reaction to this is not anger, but a bemused puzzlement. It’s the kind of reaction you have when you watch someone try to assemble furniture without instructions and end up with a chair with five legs. It’s ludicrous. But it’s also serious, because this "creative bookkeeping" is the public face of a strategy that treats global markets as a playground rather than a partnership. The data manipulation is the symptom; the disease is the gap between the rules China says it plays by and the rules it actually plays by. And as Scissors’ humor reveals, the gap is wide enough to drive a truck through, if you could buy the truck (which you can’t).
So, the irony is that China is trying to project an image of global economic maturity through data that looks like it was generated by a drunkard with a calculator. And the world is watching, not with gloating, but with the quiet amusement of someone who gets the joke, but isn’t sure who is the butt of the joke.